Hi, I’m Alex, and I was born the same year as the Nintendo Entertainment System. I want to open up this whole project with a little bit about myself and my relationship to video games.
See, the thing with being born in 1985 is that I was not exactly the target audience of the NES at its launch. I knew that Nintendo was around during the first few years of my life but I never quite understood what was going on. I knew I wanted one, though. The bright colors, the music, the interactivity; there was just this perfect storm of unknown and wonder hidden inside that grey box and I wanted to be part of it.
I am not quite sure how much I begged for an NES since my memory prior to entering kindergarten is pretty much non-existent but I’m sure that I must have put on quite a display. I believe it was October in 1990 when my dad told me that I could have a Nintendo and I was ecstatic. We went to a neighboring town and picked one up at a Sears, I think, for a whole $100! It was a fortune to my kid mind.
We got the black cardboard box open right away when we got home. I did the easy part: taking inventory. There it was! The NES itself! There were the controllers! Ooh, what’s that, a gun? It was a bright, orange gun that made the most amazing twanging sound when the trigger was pulled! I remember my mom teasing me that the gun was called a Zapper. How silly! I thought it was appropriate. It was a gun that you could zap things with. Why wouldn’t you call that a Zapper? My dad did the hard part: screwing the coaxial cable in the back of the TV. There were a few technical difficulties getting the thing to start but after about half an hour we were successful and I hardly knew what to do next.
The cartridge was in, the TV was on, and I had a choice: Super Mario Bros. or Duck Hunt! What do I do? I realized that I hadn’t put much research into this Nintendo idea. There was just something about it that called to me and I needed it but I didn’t have any friends to talk to about the Nintendo so I had little information to go on. I just had Nintendo displays at different department stores to inform me of this new phenomenon. I didn’t know of the significance of what I was looking at or how well Super Mario Brothers would hold up years and years in the future. I just wanted to be part of this culture. I decided to read the game manual to get caught up and boy did that manual deliver! The instruction manual told a fun and weird story about a Mushroom Kingdom, Princess Toadstool, and King Koopa. My mom thought that these concepts were ridiculous but I was presented with something unlike anything I had ever heard of. The manual had pictures of enemies, strategies about how to avoid danger and even an explanation about why all the clouds and bushes had faces. I was hooked before but now I was really pulled in.
Now that I was armed with this new found knowledge I immediately got started. I picked Super Mario Brothers, saw my character, looked at the open space on the right, and ran into the first enemy I possibly could and died immediately. Oops. Well, it would be a learning process to get all of this figured out and dying in a video game was certainly less painful than shooting my eye out “Christmas Story” style. To be fair, as I reflect on this part of my life it is being narrated in my head by the same voice from that movie.
Overall, I only picked up a handful of games for the Nintendo by the time I was an adult. See, on top of the subject matter of the games being an easy target for my mom’s judgment, the Nintendo became responsible for any deficiency she saw in me. Once the novelty of the game wore off and the conversations ended about how far we as a family got into the game, the Nintendo became a stranger in the house. A stranger whose influence should not dare challenge my mother’s. Suddenly the Nintendo was the cause of all of my social ills. I didn’t have many friends? It was the Nintendo’s fault. I didn’t make straight “A” grades? It was the Nintendo’s fault. I didn’t like to play outside? You had better believe it was the Nintendo’s fault. While the games served as a way for me to learn some fantasy, be creative, and have awesome, imaginative dreams those concepts were not valued by my mom. So, as a punitive measure, the Nintendo was forbidden and was locked away in a closet for over 10 years. Now I did manage to weasel video game playtime in when I visited friends, family, and the occasional reprieve from my punishment but for the most part I had to have it dangled in front of me as a reminder of what a bad kid I was. As a result I missed most of the 8 bit era and all of the 16 bit era. The next video game system I was allowed to own was the Nintendo 64 in the year 1999 which I received as a Christmas present. I then bought a GameCube in late 2001 and after that I was independent as far as video games were concerned.
Mission Statement
So why open with this? Well, I wanted to give some context to my video game experience and to communicate that I cherished most any game I got my hands on when I was a kid. I had so little time to play video games that any game was a valuable treasure in my mind. That creates a lot of bias for a nostalgic reviewer like myself and I will expand on that bias later. This also ties into my mission statement. See, I got married on September 26, 2015. My new wife and I want to start a family in the next couple of years. Video games are in such a different place today than where they were when I first discovered them. Yet, the actual practice of playing console video games is largely the same. We sit down, turn on the console, get a game started and off we go. My future kids will be of age to start playing video games of their own in about six to eight years. I want to start documenting my experiences with the games of old. I really want to prove the value of video games and understand their importance myself so that I can communicate that knowledge to my kids. When they begin to find their hobbies and their passions I want to be able to help their minds flourish instead of making them feel embarrassed or punished for liking who they are and who they may become. If they don’t become inspired by video games like I did, that’s fine. I just hope that by analyzing the NES library I can really nail down just what made this an important part of my childhood so I can look out for that spark of inspiration in my kids.
With all that in mind, let’s talk about this column and what I intend to do.
The Vision
“One Hour Reviews” is my attempt to catalog my experience playing each and every NES game. I’m going to restrict that list right off the bat because there are 884 NES titles overall according to Wikipedia. If I did one review a week I would be finished in exactly 17 years. So I am going to limit myself to licensed Nintendo games that were released in the US. This brings my total down to 677. That is still 13 years’ worth of work if I review one game a week. 13 years is still a daunting task but it is a little bit more reasonable, especially if I am able to increase my reviewing pace once I get practice. I’m only doing US releases because I only want to review games that I could have reasonably played as a 5-9 year old kid. I’m also planning only to review licensed games because Nintendo had a lot of paranoia and control as to what went on their system. To that end they put their official Seal of Approval on the lion’s share of the games that were released for the NES. Now, this certainly does not mean that these were all good games; far from it! I’m sure that just meant that the publishers went through the right channels and that Nintendo got their cut. However, unlicensed games on average tend to be lower quality than the average licensed game so I will omit those unlicensed games for now. Since we are talking about averages, let’s talk about scoring.
Since this column is called “One Hour Reviews” we should break that down.
This is a review column and that comes with some baggage. First, I tend not to like the mainstream video game reviews. There is often too much money involved in them and there is a disturbing tendency to call a 5 out of 10 “average” but having most reviews land in the 7-10 range. That means 5 out of 10 is not actually average. It also lowers the meaning of any other rating. To solve this problem for myself I am pledging to rate the NES games on a standard distribution curve. It is going to take some courage to stick to because this is what the results will look like when all of the games are rated.
Rating
|
Games
|
Meaning
|
0
|
1
|
The
Worst
|
1
|
2
|
Deplorable
|
2
|
17
|
Awful
|
3
|
67
|
Bad
|
4
|
152
|
Mediocre
|
5
|
198
|
Average
|
6
|
152
|
OK
|
7
|
67
|
Good
|
8
|
17
|
Great
|
9
|
2
|
Excellent
|
10
|
1
|
The
Best
|
I think the primary disadvantage to the method that I have chosen is that 74% of all titles will be “Mediocre” to “OK”. At the end of the day, think about it; can you name, off the top of your head, 87 NES titles that are truly “Good” or better? Also, do not under value the meaning of “OK”. An “OK” game is going to be a worthwhile play. It is above average so it brings something to the table more worthwhile than most other NES games. So now that we have established the scoring system let’s dive into how I am going to get to that score.
Playing and Scoring
I am not assigning a number to games as a real quantity. If you want a deconstruction of numeric review grades, Yahtzee of Zero and Extra Punctuation has a good column about that. I just intend to give a shorthand view to see how the entire US licensed library falls on the curve. Given how steep the curve is expect “Good” or better to be high praise while “Bad” or worse are reserved for games that are really offensive. To give all games a fair shake I intend to play each game for one hour. This might be a severe challenge for some games. Some games are so bad or so short that it might take some real discipline to play for the full hour. That’s on me.
It goes a bit deeper than that, though. I want to replicate the experience of how an average person who would be completely new to the NES would get into it. I picture the type of person who would get all of the NES games at once via some NES ROM torrent. 800+ games is a lot to sift through at once. What would that person likely do? I think they would find the games from a franchise they are familiar with like Mario or Mega Man games and play those a bunch while maybe playing some unknown game for about 30 seconds before dismissing it. I want to make sure I have played each game long enough to have a truly developed opinion on each one. I also want to document these games and maybe find scans of the box art and the manual to get them all in one place. I want to do research on some trivia on each of these games and see who else has made opinions on them. I want this to be more than a review but almost a documentary on the history of Nintendo games and their impact. To that end I am putting myself under one more restriction: I am playing these games in chronological order.
In an effort to witness the evolution of Nintendo games and to see just how certain games stacked up against the competition as they were released I want to play them in order. There is a certain challenge in that, though. The actual release dates were never really documented well. The NES was released with 17 launch titles and those have specific dates. After that, games are noted by the month and year of their release. This isn’t just the information that I’m limited to from Wikipedia, either. Nintendo’s website has a PDF of the release information for NES games that it is listed just by month and year save for the release titles and the final US title. This does give me a little freedom to play games released in a particular month in any order I want. Otherwise this is going to be a romp from October 18, 1985 to December 10, 1994 in pretty much a straight line. I want to see the lessons learned and the lessons forgotten over the years as my favorite pastime evolved into the juggernaut that it is today.
There is just one other wrinkle that I want to address: conveyance and bias. Here’s the thing, it’s impossible for me to be completely 100% fresh on these games. I already know how to play many NES games and I even managed to own a few of them. So that means I already have an opinion on many NES game to varying degrees. The fact that these games may not point out how they are played while I am playing them does not affect me in those instances. I think a game showing me how to play during gameplay is important so that is going to be a big factor in how I treat each title. I mean, I don’t read the instruction manual to any game I buy today and manuals to older games are hard to find. To that end I am going to play each game for half an hour in an attempt to understand how to play it. If I can’t figure it out or I get stuck I’m going to dig up an FAQ to make progress. If I think I have a good handle on the game before that half hour mark then I won’t bother looking up more information. There are only so many buttons on the NES controller. I think I can figure out most games.
The System
So let me break down the review process:
Play the game for an hour. If I haven’t figured it out within the first half hour I will consult guides and FAQs to make progress. Time spent looking at these guides will be applied to the total time spent. I will be recording the game to keep raw video should I graduate to doing video versions of my reviews. These videos will also be used for the screenshots I will use in the articles. I will also be recording my voice on a separate track to make sure my in-the-moment thoughts are kept for the review.
Spend an hour (or so) looking up factoids, history, images and other resources about the game to compile them into my review. I will provide as many worthwhile links at the end of each review as a matter of archiving my sources.
Write the review in the following method:
-Explain my previous history, familiarity, and bias toward the game.
-Give a little bit of interesting history.
-Talk about the gameplay and how the game does and does not teach me how to play.
-Go over the presentation and how it adds or detracts from my experience.
-Summarize my play time and how I feel the game stacks up to the rest of the competition: the rest of the NES library.
-Score the game. I will score the game with my gut reaction but if I think the game could slide up or down a space due to my desire to fill the standard distribution curve I will put that number in parentheses next to my first verdict.
So why a one hour review? For one, I don’t want to give a game a quick look and form an opinion by shooting from the hip. I really want to give each game an equal shot to leave its impression. Besides, the One Hour Review moniker is already a misnomer since I obviously have to spend more time to compile my information and write each review. Also, I have over 600 games to review. While nobody has a gun to my head telling me I have to review all of them, if I limit myself to one hour per game I might actually have a chance at completing this crazy idea. I imagine I will get more efficient at writing these articles as time goes on but I can’t imagine doing more than one a week to start off. Perhaps in my craziest dreams enough people will view this blog that I can make some ad money from this site or have people pay me to stream games, give opinions of other, more modern games, or even try to get one of their favorite games bumped up in review order because they want to hear what I have to say that badly.
At the end of the day what I can say is that I am not an angry, happy, angry, irate, grumpy, Swedish, or good looking video game reviewer. I’m just a reviewer with an opinion and an hour to spare.
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